The Immaterial Museum
I
The concept of the Immaterial Museum (Wi-Fi museum) is very simple: a parallel connection is made with the physical museum and its exhibitions and an organic bio-computational system for information transfer, communications and interactive creation is established and developed, based on a cutting edge design of technological interoperability, backed up by network protocols and wireless broadband security (Wi-Fi+Web+UMTS...).
Technological interoperability includes the implementation of the following network areas:
A – The museum portal (including at least 3 public sub-domains: the museum’s administrative sub-domain; the exhibition, documentation, etc. sub-domain and the virtual gallery);
B – The museum intranet: a communications channel strictly reserved for the staff of the museum (private Blog);
C – The museum extranet: a communications channel for exclusive access by the community of institutions, artists and public taking part in specific activities (semi-public Blog);
D – Wireless high-fidelity (Wi-Fi) broadband network for cost-free public access, reaching to the whole of the museum (hot spot);
E – Internet and Wi-Fi services provider (ISP) ready for semantic convergence on the Web, with proven experience in RSS feeds and Information Gatherers.
F – An Office of Creative Management charged with the management of the system as well as its technological, social and cultural development, directly under the Museum Management.
The implementation of the Wi-Fi multifunctional broadband network for the MEIAC should be accompanied by an architectural reform of the museum gardens. Such reform, presented in schematic form at ARCO_2004 is based on the need of attracting a new young and diverse public for the wide spaces surrounding the museum.
This reform has 3 components:
i. Mechanical access to the atrium of the Museum. It is indeed necessary to design a new access, complementary to the steep stone stairs leading to the Museum;
ii. Cafeteria, Restaurant and Museum Shop: these social areas shall constitute an strategic interface for a faster integration of the MEIAC within the city and Extremadura’s cultural tourism routes.
iii. Fountains for the Dialogue (architectural Hot Spots): 8 architectural fantasies designed to provide a comfortable space for the visitors of the gardens of the MEIAC throughout the year. Water, tables, benches, shades and thermal protection, fancy, youth and a belief in the future are the main determining factors for this project, all in an area with cost-free Wi-Fi broadband connectivity.
These fountains, operating as hot spots or architectural plug-ins, claim back the main ideas of theoretical architect Peter Cook and the Archigram (concepts developed in the 60s), in a context finally appropriate for their ground-breaking proposals.
Another, different thought we would like to suggest to young architects is to view the Fountains for the Dialogue not only as architectural visions, but rather as something of greater conceptual significance: variable geometry architectures; architecture for each season (with summer, spring/autumn and winter versions); interfaces connecting physical reality and virtual reality; i.e., as hot spot architecture and plug-in architecture.
A contest open to young architects from all over the world would be the best way to put this programme into practice.
MEIAC looks in this way to place itself among the most relevant museum experiences of the 21st Century.
II
Some key ideas about the transition to an Immaterial Museum:
- THE PUBLIC CHOICE: dynamic reception.
-- The post-contemporary museum has yet to complete the essential mission of making a preliminary examination of the creative technosphere, looking for play lists determined by the genealogical and critical knowledge provided by the massive contributions made by art and by the urban, global media culture and technological culture in general;
-- Nowadays innovation comes from the over-abundance of creative stimuli and cumulative-authorship artworks; the exponential iteration of available titles created by the dissemination of these works through the Net; or the stream of interpretations and modifications of said works by their different public, creators and symbio-creators;
-- Aesthetic reception has stopped being, for the most part, a passive activity which did not allow to feed back the original work; now, said reception is increasingly the social and individual result of the modulation and deconstruction of artworks, as a consequence of the act of listening, watching or creatively enhancing their reality itself. The public becomes a co-performer or participant in the creative game in each of the virtual art networks which capture their attention and collaborative will.
-- This implies a true revolution in the curatorial concepts: if a technological democracy is an acceptable utopian prospect, it is then necessary to train the next generation of museum curators to integrate the operational dimension of the public into the logic of the concept of the global museum and its community-focused activities.
- THE IMMATERIAL MUSEUM: a friendly technology.
-- The idea of technological complexity, added to the fear of obsolescence and functional failure associated to the application of the new technologies to artistic constructs is often a recurrent argument of the institutional conservatism still present in many a contemporary art museum;
-- We are heading, however, towards an era of friendly technology in which it will be increasingly transparent and will try to talk to us in welcoming terms;
-- We are heading towards a semantic Web and an new stage of technological transparency.
- THE SERVER MUSEUM: replay, variation, indexing and search of virtual art.
-- The virtual museum is in fact a server of creative applications and a cartographic guide specialized in the meta-description of a particular world: the particular world of arts and culture in general.
-- The virtual museum is, provided we examine it carefully and without prejudice, an strategically adequate option for describing art history, its creations and their public, on the one hand, and, on the other, for the conservation, study and dissemination of visual art, that is, of those creations which existence is strictly dependent of computer activity: Net-art, AICII art, Anime, Character Design, Generative Art, Arte Bios, etc.
-- What the virtual museum can do, and that which the virtual museum should do in this future which is already taking place, will not be possible for any other kind of museum. This phenomenological irreversibility is what turns its emergence into a historic event (as Luckacs could have said).
Antonio
Cerveira-Pinto
Curator
email
Andre Sier
email
http://sier.risco.pt/
António
Carvalho
email
Brian Mackern
email
Sound
Toys
Carlos Sant'Ana
email
Christian Montenegro
email
http://www.christianmontenegro.com.ar/
Marta de Menezes
email
Nature?
Netart Latino
Database
Netart
Latino Database